[zoe77]

My 18 month old is still breastfed but also eats lots of food. He has multiple food intolerance/allergy symptoms (red ring, yeasty diaper rash in groin area, flushed cheeks, dry skin (eczema?). I'm ready to stop living in denial and work on figuring this out. But I feel so overwhelmed, where do I start? Since he is still breastfeeding does that mean we both need to go on an elimination diet? He gets frozen breast milk at daycare, can I not give that to him while we are trying to figure this out?

Any advice on how to start is greatly appreciated.

 

[kjbrown92]

A food journal is a must. Write down everything you and he eat/drink (including supplements), and any/all symptoms. If you give him frozen breastmilk from another day, you won't be able to tell anything, unfortunately. The top 8 allergens are pretty well known. The top 4 intolerances are dairy, gluten, soy, and corn. Some people eliminate one thing at a time. Take out dairy for a week, if you don't get to baseline (no symptoms), then take out dairy and gluten for a week... if you don't get to baseline, take out dairy, gluten, and soy for a week... etc. Think about all the things you can eat (and eat lots of it) and try not to focus on the things you can't. Making all your own food is "easiest" in the sense that you know what is in everything and there are less ingredients to write down. If you eliminate something and symptoms get worse, it usually means you've added something or more of something that is a trigger.

 

[balancedmama]

I think it varies by the dyad. With both of my kids, as long as I didn't binge on the offending allergen, I would see a significant improvement just by taking it out of their direct diet. That's just my own experience, of course. DS is egg, soy allergic and DD is dairy, soy, peanut. With DS, he would get eczema outbreaks if I were to eat scrambled eggs for breakfast every day. But if I eat a piece of banana bread that has an egg or two in the whole loaf...no obvious symptoms.

I think like the PP says, you can probably start with top 8, the most obvious culprits. Just pick one and take it out of his diet, and don't overdo it in yours. That's how I'd do it.

 

[zoe77]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kjbrown92 Think about all the things you can eat (and eat lots of it) and try not to focus on the things you can't.

Thanks for that thought, I'll definitely try to focus on what we CAN have

I did some reading yesterday and read that foods high in salicylates can cause the flushed red cheeks so I'm going to try no fruit for 10 days and see if there is any improvement. If not, then we'll start eliminating the top allergens. We did have some weird rashes over the summer and our ped recommended cutting back on fruit, specifically berries, and it helped. If the elimination of all fruit helps his symptoms then I'll add one back at a time to see what the biggest offenders are.

In the meantime I'm going to try and get myself off dairy so that if in ten days we need to eliminate dairy from his diet it will mostly already be out of my breast milk.

Thank you both for your responses, they were very helpful.

Oh, and I'll def start a food journal again.

 

[mamafish9]

Quote:

Originally Posted by zoe77 Thanks for that thought, I'll definitely try to focus on what we CAN have I did some reading yesterday and read that foods high in salicylates can cause the flushed red cheeks so I'm going to try no fruit for 10 days and see if there is any improvement.

Sounds like a good track to take if eliminating berries helped. Bananas and pears are fine for low sals. Mango in small quantities is usually OK.

Also take out the highest sals other foods - olive & coconut oil, almonds, tomatoes - basically anything on the high/very high lists here http://salicylatesensitivity.com/food-guide.

Watch out for spices and natural fruit flavors/extracts (except lemon/lime), and mint flavors - those are CRAZY high (look in things like chewables or vite C supps). Also herbs - like pretty much all herbal teas except chamomile.

Also know that many high sals foods are also high in histamines - and people can be sensitive to either or both of those.

Last, if it is sals or histamine sensitivity, there are supps you can take to help increase tolerance. B6/mag/molybdenum for sals, C/methyl b12 and some mag/b6 for histamines.

 

[zoe77]

Thanks so much for the website and supplement info. The redness is getting better already so I think (and hope) this may be it. Once there is no redness on his cheeks and diaper area I'm going to add the fruits back one at a time to test each one.

 

[mamafish9]

If it is salicylates sensitivity, you won't see a reaction to particular fruits, necessarily - salicylates is a bucket reaction, so it depends on the quantity of salicylates consumed. One day, an apple might be fine, the next day it might not.

 

[zoe77]

Ah, I should have known it couldn't be that easy. So what is the best way to proceed? Just try to not overdo the high salicylate foods?

 

[mamafish9]

The first step is to get all the high and very high sals foods out (and do detective work, they include a lot of things most people don't think about) - also high sals ingredients in lotions, teas, supplements.

Then do that for 4-6 weeks at least - this allows your child's sals bucket to "empty", since right now, they're on total overload. Then you can start introducing some sals, and figure out how much they can tolerate on an ongoing basis.

During that 4-6 weeks, and ongoing, it can really build sals tolerance to supplement molybdenum (a mineral, you can get easy drops from Nutricology/Allergy Research group), magnesium (Epsom salts baths and/or oral mag - not mag oxide, I like mag glycinate). Mag can be tough to get in a child though, it doesn't taste great. And then B6 - which passes well through breastmilk, so YOU take more B6 (ideally the active form, P5P), and your babe will get it.

 

[zoe77]

Will the salicylates transfer through my breast milk? Do I need to be eliminating all of these foods also?